One year ago Friday, Apple launched its iTunes App Store. And it's been one hell of a wild - if famously flatulent - ride ever since.
Love it or hate it, the iPhone has been a runaway success, and the App Store has been a major contributor to its inarguable megahit status.
In the beginning, the App Store's original 800 …

COMMENTS

Damnit Rik

"But happy first birthday, App Store. You've grown big and strong, but you haven't yet found your moral compass or fully developed your sense of responsibility. Hopefully, that will come soon."

Your really out to change my opinion of you arnt you? :P Anyway I will say I hope that nothing changes with the apps store because if it did what would happen to all the great stories about some of the stupid crap Apple does on it that makes no sense?

Moral Compass

Set Phasers to ...................

Yea Apple store is the King of the useless software where else would you get the chance to download an app like iTeaseMyboss though I still love looking like a knob from one of the Star Trek movies with their Tri-Corders

Re: All farting aside

@Joe K, David Edwards:

You are right. El Reg likes to ridicule the App Store for all the useless crap, but tends to skip reporting on the (admittedly few) very useful and innovative apps. For every few hundred fart apps there's one really good game or such.

It's like critisizing the Internet as useless just because it's the biggest repository of pr0n and apocryphal trivia in human history. Sure, the crap's out there and it is very easy to stumble upon; but it's not like there is absolutely no useful content, which is equally as easy to find.

Admitedly few good apps?

OK, it's small by percentage, but I've dowloaded and tried (or tried on someone else's) iPhone over 200-250 apps I've really liked. Many have been demos or free trials, and although i though the game or app was real good, $5.99-9.99 apps go on my waiting list and I get them if/when they go on sale. I only own 3-4 apps i paid $5.99 for (and fieldrunners is one of them).

I have all my 11 screens full save a few spots. About 1/3rd is games. Half those apps were free, the majority of the rest were 0.99 or 1.99 (some on sale, others were just that price to start with). I have no "gimick" apps on my device. I've nabbed a few free ones in the past thinking they were somethine more inteeresting, and quickly purged them from iTunes and the phone, but overall of the more than 200 apps I actually have on my PC, and about 150 on the phone at any time, I have maybe 10 I'm keeping around i considder "useless" and thats only because of forthcoming promised free content updates.

There might be 56,000 active apps in the store, and I agree more than half are outright crap or "unfinished" apps that need work or major content additions, and about 20% of the remaining are trial versions of full apps, but there's easy 1,000 completely usefull apps in that store, and that's not counting the specialty apps like medical dictionaries and diagnostic tools only a few select people are interested in.

What's on my device, the core 40-50 apps I use aty least once a week, and the few "can't live without" utilities that i don't use often but simply won;t delete, maybe I've spent $70-80 total. On my old Palm, just 3-4 apps cost me that much, and their UI sucked...

OK, there's not a version of Microsoft Office yet (give em time, they admit they're working on it; it took 3 years to get one out for the Palm OS, and a while for other platforms too). Some of the other things people are asking for (in small but vocal numbers) also have yet to appear. But in general, spend $50 on apps for any other device and see what you get compared to what's in the app store for the same price. Maybe that game on the iPhone isn't as major of a release as it is for the PSP, but it was $2 on the iPhone and $40 for your PSP...

...and it's only been a year, and 3 major OS releases and the promise of 4.0 and new multiprocess capability coming. (like background GPS TomTom demoed).

The phone's not perfect, but it;s a heck of a platform and evolving fast. Many of the apps suck (especially as a percentage of the whole), but there's an easy 500-1000 AWESOME apps, and multiple serious competitors leaving you choices in most app genres.